Seidman, Nachum

Rabbi Dr. Nachman Seidman was born in Tarnopol in 1888. After graduating the Gymnasium in Tarnopol, he studied philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1911. He was joined in Vienna by his parents, brothers and sister when WWI broke out. In 1915 he was awarded a PhD in philology, and he taught religion at a Gymnasium in Lemberg. In 1917 he married Regina Singer. In 1920 he travelled to the US with two other Rabbis as delegates of the Mizrahi, for a planned visit of three months. Friends advised him not to return to Poland, and he remained in the US and was joined by his wife and son. He became a US citizen in 1926, served as a Rabbi in Brooklyn and taught at Yeshiva University. In 1934 he moved to Palestine with his family, but in 1935 he and his wife were divorced, and he returned to the US alone. In 1939 he married Vida Goldman. They settled in Brooklyn and founded the Congregation and Talmud Torah Beth Isaac [named after his wife’s father]. Unlike in most synagogues in New York, where the Rabbi was an employee of a community or a board of directors, he was able to fulfill his own vision of a Modern Orthodox community: Orthodox, as opposed to the local Reform and Conservative temples; Modern, as opposed to the shtiblech which didn’t attract the young, English-speaking generation of Jews who had grown up in America. Appeals raised money for patriotic causes during WWII, and for Israel after 1948. The building provided a meeting-place for many Jewish and general oganizations – among them ecumenical, political, fraternal and veterans groups. The Talmud Torah taught Hebrew and basic Jewish practice to a generation of public schoolboys, while preparing them for their bar-mitzvah. Rabbi Seidman died in 1956, and his wife continued to operate the synagogue until the early 1970s when she sold the building to a Rabbi who promised to maintain it as a synagogue. Read more